The Houseguest (25 page)

22.

B
Y THE TIME
Ana, exhausted and pregnant, climbed the gangway in Southampton, she'd been traveling by land for six days, sleeping sitting up, an hour here, an hour there. She could smell her own body's sour stench, kept bending forward to stretch her lower back. Hundreds of passengers and onlookers crowded the dock. She made her way up the gangway, bodies pushing in from every side, old bodies barely strong enough to tow a bag, young ones straining against their parents' grips, infants held close. Ana wondered how many were fleeing like herself. She heard German, Yiddish, Polish, Russian, other tongues she couldn't name. A clawing, claustrophobic feeling came over her so she kept her eyes on the distance as she pushed through the crowd. Waves crashed against the rocks below while seagulls swooped from above, painting wide arcs across a hazy sky.

She'd purchased a ticket in a second-class cabin, a room the size of a water closet with two coffin-sized cots. On the cot beside hers lay an old lady in a gray dress, gray stockings, short gray hair. She was clutching a photo album to her chest. Her eyes were closed, and Ana assumed she was sleeping until she spoke without looking up.

“
Sprechen Sie Deutsch?
” she said in a weak, even voice.

“
Ja. Ein bisschen
.” Ana spoke German with a Polish accent.

The woman didn't respond for several moments. Ana sat down on her cot, was about to unlatch her suitcase when the woman said,
eyes still closed, album still clutched, “
Noch eine Ostjüdin
.” Another Eastern Jew.

Ana pushed her suitcase under the cot as a low rumbling sounded from the bowels of the ship. Inside her there was movement as well, a subtle rotation, as though the child were trying to discern its new position in the world. She left the room to watch the ship lift anchor.

THE FIRST TWO
days at sea passed calmly. The weather was cool but clear. Ana walked back and forth on deck all day, tried to read, to write to Szymon, but couldn't make her mind hold still. The food was stale, served on metal plates with nothing but water, but she had no appetite anyhow. She paced all day, avoided her cabin, tried not to think of the future or the present, instead let her mind drift back to her early years on stage in Odessa. She'd been nineteen, fearless. She'd had a string of love affairs, enough that she couldn't remember the men, only the places they had taken her around the city. There was one who carried her onto a boat along the Kodyma River. There was another who took her to the Gorodsky Gardens and read her Turgenev beneath a lemon tree. She could remember the play of shadow and light on the river, the forsythia along the garden path, but not the faces of the lovers themselves.

She wrote more letters, tried to eat a little, tried to hold her loneliness at bay. She played chess one morning with a pleasant old man, a Frankfurt doctor with a kind face and a neat mustache. “And where are you from, my dear?” he asked her. “I can't place your accent.”

“Everywhere and nowhere,” she told him, admiring his shy smile. He seemed to possess all the warmth the woman in Ana's cabin lacked, asked how far along she was, brought her tea before their games, then tried to let her win. She was terrible at chess and he couldn't quite manage it. He'd offer her an opening, and she'd pass it by, distracted by the clouds, a banking of the ship. “I'm a little better on land,” she told him. “But only a little.”

“You're perfect, my dear.”

Her third afternoon at sea she was on her way to a game when the weather turned gray and a feeling came over her that something wasn't right. She thought it was seasickness at first, a clawing, dizzy nausea. She paced the deck, gripping the railing, but the air felt dank, clammy. The fog had the strangest smell, like salt and corroded metal, like dead things rotting on the sand. Then she realized it was her own smell, that it was coming from her, something sour. She began to shiver.

By midnight she was bleeding. The doctor from Frankfurt came to her room but said there wasn't much he could do. He held a stethoscope to her belly, placed it here, there, told her to try to stay calm. He might have done more to ease her suffering on land, but here he had no supplies, no nurse, no medication. Even through her agony, she understood; he was a good man, a refugee, a Jewish-German doctor with problems of his own. He stood beside her all night while she bled. The floor looked like a butcher's block by dawn. The pain came in waves, then in pulses. She begged to be clubbed, thrown overboard. At one point, a steward came by to see about the wailing. “It's frightening the other passengers,” he told the doctor.

“Would you have me smother her in that case?”

“Don't you have something you can give her?”

“Have something?” he repeated. “I have many things. Medicine, equipment. Nurses. They're in my office in Frankfurt. They belong to a German fellow along with the rest of my belongings. Here, on this ship, I have my hands, a bottle of antiseptic, and a toothbrush.”

The steward walked off without reply.

By morning her palms were covered with crescent-shaped cuts where she'd pressed her fingernails into her flesh. Then, all at once, the pain gave way to pressure, a wave rolling through her. The baby was born early the next morning. A child the size of her hand and the color of a cloudy day.

FOR NINE MORE
nights, they sailed. She laughed in her sleep and cried all day, dreamt of shipwrecks, watery deaths. When she closed her eyes, she saw torpedoes spinning through the ocean, imagined the jolt that would crack the ship from stern to bow, and then the rush of water rising up like a geyser. She indulged the strangest thoughts; she convinced herself the whole world should be covered by water. The land belonged to the Nazis now. Everything good and pure was better off drowned. But she didn't throw herself overboard, didn't end things at sea, as she might have. She thought only of what she'd been sent forth to achieve. “You'll go,” Szymon had commanded, “And from there, you'll help me cross.” He'd spoken as though it would be so easy, as though she couldn't possibly fail. She held his voice in her heart, as the ship dropped anchor.

On trembling legs, she walked down the gangway to Ellis Island.

WHEN SHE OPENED
her eyes, everyone was talking, and no one understood. Three hundred voices in every tenor, every pitch. Yiddish, German, Polish, Russian. The words were not words but bursts of noise, rising, falling, merging, spreading over the auditorium, a noise like an engine, a din that softened in the evenings when they shut out the lights but never really ceased. It was three hundred different voices asking where they were and what they'd do next, why were they waiting and who could help them and where was the toilet, the person responsible for processing papers, and did anyone know where the pats of butter in tin foil had come from, where you could get more, or the little toothbrushes being handed out. Occasionally, she could hear one question clearly above the rest, the way, if you stare long enough, you see a fish break the surface of a calm sea, but mostly there was only noise, thick, impenetrable, a wall of it on every side, a blanket of sound she pulled up to her chin the few hours she slept, the first thing she noticed when she opened her eyes.

The auditorium was on the third floor of a gray building on 59th Street, and the building was the temporary home of the Joint Distribution Committee's headquarters.

She didn't know this at the time. What she knew was a high, raftered ceiling that trapped and bent and spread the noise down in every direction, and the narrow cot on which she lay, not quite long enough to hold both her head and her feet. She was one of three hundred. The cots had been placed in rows of twelve like cartons of eggs. Ana was in the middle of a carton, neither the youngest nor the oldest, neither the calmest nor the most distraught. Her first day there she did little besides rest, turn from one side to the other, covering her eyes with the thin sheet, drifting in and out of sleep, a fever passing through her. As she recovered, it grew harder to ignore the noise, the damp heat, the flickering windowless light, the proximity of strangers' bodies, strangers' voices, the forced intimacy of watching people change shirts and slurp soup out of small metal cups, and weep for those who weren't with them, sometimes quietly, crumpling into themselves, other times without shyness or shame.

By the end of the first day the bleeding had stopped but her body felt weak, leaden. Her back ached. Her throat was parched. It took her two hours to find the hallway where a nurse behind a makeshift clinic was passing out cups of water and aspirin. The second day she was better able to walk, to lean against the wall, survey the others. They were men and women, old and young, newly arrived and stranded for weeks. Some hardly seemed to know where the restroom was. Others were entrenched, surrounded by stashes of candy bars and cigarettes and nail clippers and dental floss. The man beside her had a black coat, black hat, gray beard, the angular, ageless face of the Orthodox. She'd passed someone like him a thousand times in Warsaw. Hadn't she once described the Orthodox as mice? “They're everywhere,” she said to Szymon. A rainy fall day five years before. They were standing under
an awning to get out of the weather, huddling close for the first time while the water fell in sheets around them. He was smiling, a smile that connoted both attraction and something else—bemusement, disdain. “You really don't like Jews, do you? You're going to tell me you're a Nazi, now. A Yiddish actress Nazi.”

“I don't like sameness. I don't like mindless uniformity. I want everyone and everything in the world to be distinctly itself. That's all.”

“That's all.” His smile became laughter. The rain kept coming, harder now. She put her hands inside his trench coat. “I'm cold.”

He leaned forward and tasted the rain on her cheek.

The Orthodox man lay beside her now, as close as a lover. He prayed quietly, facing the wall, his six-foot frame closed up like a clam shell, rocking gently. On the other side, there was an Austrian woman shaving her legs under a hand towel. She'd draped it over her knees, set a bowl of soapy water by her feet, pointed and flexed her toes as she moved the blade. Beside her, a Polish girl was nursing an infant. And all around them, up and down the hallway, strangers waiting, distinct but the same. She was one of them now, more one of them than herself. It was her old fear coming to pass, the reason she avoided parades, political rallies. She feared losing herself to large numbers the way others feared fire or heights.

Her third day, she ventured out of the auditorium, into the stairwell, onto the floor above where there were offices and secretaries instead of refugees. During the First World War, the Joint Distribution Committee had saved Palestine's Jewish colonies from blockade, then the villages of the Pale from postwar famine. Now, from what she saw, the organization was not battling war or famine but bureaucracy itself. The entire headquarters was awash in papers, affidavits, immigration applications. The windows of the small offices were stacked with unread files. The morning sun streamed in through cracks in the stacks. Officials walked the hallways with pillars of paper in their arms, moving the documents from room to room, cabinet to cabinet.

There was an office with the door ajar, a single office at the end of a long hallway. She walked slowly, alone for the first time in weeks. Someone was humming inside the office. A man's voice. A familiar tune. She peered in, saw only hands typing. A throat cleared. She knocked softly, pushed through. The man hardly looked at her. On either side of him sat stacks of files reaching higher than his head. “Can I help you?” he said. “Ladies' room at the other end of the hall, back the way you came.”

She combed her hair with her fingers.

“You speak English?” he repeated. “Bathroom?” he said.

“I speak English,” she said, stepping forward. “I speak many languages. English. Yiddish. Polish. Russian. A smattering of French. You choose the language. Then we'll talk.”

He'd been glancing up at her while he typed. Now the typing stopped. The glance became an earnest gaze. He pushed back a little from his desk. Then, in his own good time, he made a motion with his head for her to come into the office. So, he would help her. It was hearing the way she spoke that had done it. Not for the first time, her voice, her mother's voice, had lifted her above the fray.

“My name is Spiro,” the man said. “Why don't you take a seat?”

SHE WOKE TO
the sound of the ringing. In her dream, it was a round of applause so bright it chimed across the air, a chorus of gulls. As she came to her senses, she realized it was only the phone beside her bed, in the empty room at the Hotel Utica.

“Yes,” she said, in the voice that wasn't hers.

“It's me,” said Spiro.

23.

M
AX WAS NOT
allowed back into the conference and the captain of the
St. Louis
was forced by Coast Guard boats to steer his ship back into the Atlantic with no clear indication of where it should go. Max sat in the hallway outside the ballroom. The Negro bellboys working the floor eyed him with pitiable fascination. One brought him a glass of water. Max listened. There were few raised voices, little movement, only a low, steady drone of wretchedly amenable chatter. Finally he heard a mass scraping of chairs and the noise moved toward the doors. They swung open and the entire conference, all the sallow men in suits, streamed into the hall. They said little. Their faces were expressionless, taut, unmoved. A few of them looked down at Max and muttered or shook their heads. Hirschler walked by without acknowledging him.

Max could not glean what had happened from the little bits of passing conversation but he knew it was not good. It was Harold Sacks from the Refugee Placement Service who stopped, and in a voice that did not lack kindness, told him the boat's fate.

“And Cuba?” said Max.

“From what we can gather the president has authorized his navy to fire on any foreign ships that come within two thousand yards of his ports.”

Sacks was small, taciturn; in the moments Max had observed him he had done nothing to demonstrate that he held Max in anything higher than ambivalence. He was a face, a muted voice, a neutered spirit. But now as he stooped, shared the news with Max and offered a look of condolence, Max could hardly bear to meet his gaze. Sacks extended his hand.

“Thanks for trying,” he said.

As the ship full of Jewish refugees sailed (or drifted) into oblivion, as the sun was melting into the horizon with an intensity of color that made Max think of the South of France and the blood of fallen soldiers and the fact that one day the sun would burn itself out and everything—the oceans and continents of land and warring peoples of the earth—would pass, after all that was over, Max called Spiro with the news.

“Lovely,” said Spiro. “Just lovely.” From his flattened tone Max could tell Spiro already knew.

“Is there anything else . . . ?”

“No, Max, there isn't.”

“I was thinking, I thought something public.” Max's voice was so small again, squeezed by the phone booth, by the tiny black wires connecting him to New York. “If we could organize rabbis. A hunger strike on the steps of the White House. Let everyone see us die the same slow death as the people on the boat.”

“You wouldn't make a good martyr, Max. We'll wire you the money for a ticket back. There's work to be done still.”

“What's next for them?”

“Who knows? No one can tell the future. Did you know a giant wave once washed over the entire Florida peninsula where you are? They can tell by the silt on either side. A tidal wave. You can be safe one minute and gone the next. All of us. We do the best we can.”

Max suddenly felt very claustrophobic. The dim phone booth cut off from the soaring hotel lobby. The thought of Spiro in that cramped lightless non-room. The day spent in the hallway.

HE DECIDED TO
go for a swim.

It was nearly night. Only a few children remained on the beach, digging into the sand on the shoreline. The sky and the sea seemed a single, silver entity. He took off his shoes and placed them on a beach chair. He set his wallet and notepad beside them. He walked out into the water, up to his knees at first, then up to his hips. The ocean's perfection surprised him. It had absorbed the day's heat, eternity's, and diffused it into something soothing, balm-like. When it reached his chest, he slipped out of his clothes. His pants and undershorts fell right off. His shirt floated on the surface of the water, the arms extended in a gesture of mock terror or relaxation. He was naked but he was not ashamed. In Chicago, Hirschler told him that shame was the most destructive emotion in the human repertoire of feeling. Nothing good could come of it because it turned men into cowards, broke down the parts of them that were strong and buoyed the ones that were weak. He'd said this with his normal bemusement, with that thin, impenetrable smile.

He closed his eyes and floated, then swam farther out, then floated again. The sky housed stars and a few purple clouds. He found some aesthetic pleasure in these white, pulsating movements but knew that what he saw was, essentially, nothing. These were not even the real heavens. Only small bright suggestions of the impossible beyondness that encompassed everything. The real thing he knew (or imagined) was glorious and blazing, arrangements of geometric light and time that he hadn't the vocabulary for. The space you got, that the water held you up against, was a token, bits of sluiced infinite lodged in the sticky atmosphere. You admired it with the understanding that the true experience wasn't seen but internal. The closest you got to the unending was in your blood, your marrow, your bones, the inextinguishable elements that spread into you just as they did through the sky beyond the sky. You felt that, and you understood, you could sense the lingering vibrations of creation and annihilation.

He flipped from his back to his stomach, paddled forward. The water grew cool around his feet and legs. A noise rose from his throat—a high, soft sob. He was afraid. He closed his eyes.

When he opened them, the space that had opened between himself and the shoreline was startling. In the opposite distance, he could see a line of light, a change in color, the shallow slope of something solid. The line was the
St. Louis
and every other ship with no place to go but the lands they'd fled. The change in color was the place where the ocean met the sky. The solid thing was his body.